


A Desert With It’s Life Underground

by Paranormal_Shitness



Category: Batman (Comics), DC Comics, Nightwing And The Outsiders (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Bad Communication, Casual Drug Use, Daddy Issues, M/M, Supernatural Elements, Toxic Relationship, Yearning, drabble length, fear of intimacy, pre 52, psychogeography, vague religious themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22783309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paranormal_Shitness/pseuds/Paranormal_Shitness
Summary: What if it’s JayRoy but the relationship dynamics are all fucked up because they both have issues and Jason refuses to leave Gotham so they’re Fuck Buddies With Baggage?Just arranging some headcanons for a slight AU into drabbles to kill writers block.
Relationships: Jason Todd/Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd/Roy Harper, Red Hood/Arsenal - Relationship, Red Hood/Batman
Comments: 3
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> trying to get back into writing/posting literal anything lmao because the block has been RealEr than ever this year. Also playing with tenses after spending too long with German lit.

“What do you think about boats?” Roy asks while they’re lying there on the floor. Jason isn’t sure what time it is but the beer bottles have accumulated to a decent stack in not one but two corners nearby them and the sky has gone that pale blue color which gives him the impression they haven’t moved for several hours. Although what they’d done for all that time is a mystery to him. As though he’s blinked and time is different and Roy is asking him about boats.

He wants to sit up or possibly even to move, but that all seems beyond his capabilities. Instead, he rolls onto his side and curls up to stare at the carpet, count each individual strand of beige. “Boats?” He replies, not really caring anything for the subject.

“Yeah,” Roy says. “Boats man. The sea. The open ocean.”

Jason says, “You’re high.”

“I know that but it’s a thought exercise. You gotta imagine it.”

“Whenever I imagine you it’s always in a desert,” Jason tells the bland fibers in front of him.

This get him a laugh. Something crass and almost cranky. When he looks up, Roy’s looking at him with that uncomfortable expression you might turn on someone who knows you too well without trying.

So Jason looks him dead into his eyes and says, “You’re always in the desert and you’re always alone.”

They fuck for the first time again not long after. Once the talk of secrets has started. After they’ve come and gone from the imagery- "Do you still believe in God?” “I hope not” “Do you believe in Batman?” -At a certain point it all feels like it makes sense and the world is coming into alignment as Roy’s hands hug across the small of his back, fingers dug into the skin so it rucks it all up and changes the order of his scars.

“I can’t,” Roy told him when he asked him to stay in Gotham. “I don’t belong here. I don’t see it like you.”

Jason wishes he did as the carpet burns a rash into his upper back and his head finally hits the wall.

“I can’t,” Jason had said when Roy had asked him to leave.

But it’s still the most right he’s felt in a long time as Roy’s hand closes on his throat and he wonders why he can’t have it. Why can’t he keep this little bit of heaven when it’s the only one he’s ever had?

_Not true. He had bruce in the manor. He had Alfred and Ace. They were a family._

“I wish it was simple,” they’d both said at one point or another but it’s not. None of it is. Jason isn’t even himself half the time. 

But now, in this moment, Roy looks him in his eyes and he says, “I own you,” like it is simple and Jason feels it in his bones like it’s true even when it’s not. There are hands in him, that will remain in him, that have been in him since before he was born and they aren’t Roy’s hands.  
“I own you,” Roy insists and in that instance, as the sun breaks itself over the horizon, its true. But by the time it’s anything worth calling morning, Jason wakes up on the couch with a blanket thrown over him and Roy is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Distance is an illusion. Talia always says that. Distance is an illusion, space is a farce. Humanity is one mind in one body, the Earth. 

Talia is full of shit. 

If distance was an illusion it wouldn’t be so visceral when it came knocking on the door. Jason knows he belongs in Gotham. Leaving the city is like walking through a wall of viscous fog, choking the whole way. He can feel the hands in him when he tries to go. Talia did tell him, “Once you go back there.. you’ll be back.” It should have been a pretty self explanatory thing for her to have said. But Gotham isn’t the only thing Jason knows. 

He also knows Dick and Tim can hear that calling from outside the city. He knows they can answer it when he can’t. They can have what he can’t.

Roy told him once, a while back, he’d been in the city on some job with Dick and dropped in to see Jason after. He said “This is just a shittier LA, man.” Which of course had started an argument. 

“LA doesn’t have gothic architecture. What crack are you on?”

“Whatever you cut into lines must have different effects on each of us because I’ve never seen no gothic architecture.”

“What about the gargoyles?! You leaned on one while we took a break over midtown, on 47th and Keats. That was just on the way over here, you shit sack.”

It’d been a useless argument. But Roy had gotten it down to the quick. “I just don’t belong here. All you natives talk about the beauty of the city. How it breathes and sings to you and this and that but I honestly believe that’s nonsense,” he’d said.

Jason had excused him from the visit by asking him to leave at this point and laid on the couch upside down trying to puzzle it out. Now, every once in a while, between blinks, the city before his eyes is not the city he knows. It looks foreign. Alien. Nothing like his home.

And there are many days, days that are typical in every other way, that it occurs to Jason suddenly, as he’s in the middle of some decisive action, that he misses Roy and the pain he’s feeling, though not as intense as an attempt to leave Gotham, is still comparable to walking through that wall of fog.

Gotham meets the water heavy. New Jersey mud sliding into the brack. These swamps aren’t Florida swamps, they’re colder and more foreboding. As though some ancient giant bled into the roots of the trees there. Tough trunked conifers with pine needle cones and misshapen arms laden heavy with hanging moss, water logged oaks and beeches trying to survive the brine as the entire county slowly sinks into the earth, swallowed by the cave systems below.

Rising waterlines only complicate the entire disaster. Jason’s heard recently that parts of the cave system attached to the Batcave have been flooding on and off with the tides. B seems worried that in the next ten to twenty years every penny he’s spent on his personal hideaway will be wasted under water. Jason’s more worried what will happen when the cults have nowhere else to practice their sacrifices. 

Humidity creeps into his bones sodden and sullen as it pleads with him to succumb to its clammy insistence. And somewhere, far from here, Jason can imagine Roy, alone in that desert, blending into the red rocks, walking through midnight super blooms, illuminated by a full moon and all the stars no one in Gotham would ever see through the smog there. It’s a dry place. A place the ocean hasn’t touched for thousands of years, the bones of fish embedded deep beneath the current sand, scorpions a close reminder of the distant past. 

The cold does not bother Jason. It hasn’t for a long time. So there are moments, on nights like these where the urge to leave the city takes him hard, that he bikes out across the river, up the cliff face into the palisades where he holes up on the grounds at Wayne Manor and reminds himself of his place in the world by lying on the empty ground where his grave once was. The grass is soft, that lurid deep sort of green that looks black in the moonlight. He takes off his boots and his gloves, lays his helmet on the unmarked stone above him and eases into the it as though lying atop a bed with the covers pulled up. It isn’t comforting but it is quiet. He is alone. He can think with the cold dew pressed into his outer layers, slowly soaking through them. It’s so easy to breathe here. So simple he doesn’t need the helmet, doesn’t need to think about it. The air comes in. The air goes out.

He can lie there and imagine the cold whip of that dry wind, all the way across the continent, in a place where Roy isn’t but does belong. And Roy is always alone. Gotham whispers of a man who is always alone.

And she never stops whispering.


	3. Chapter 3

Hell goes out on his breath. He sucks the air in pure and clean and it goes out rotten and he watches the rot. Something inside him didn’t come back. Something inside him is still dead and he can smell the festering even if no one else can. 

But he thinks they can.

People all keep their distance once they get close enough to get a whiff. Even Roy.

Especially Roy. 

He’s shit to Roy. He’s convinced. Last time he saw the man it was on some work trip that wasn’t related to seeing him at all. They’d bumped into each other by Crime Alley. Literally bumped. How neither one of them saw the red coming straight for them even in the dark was a wonder. Regardless, Roy had just said “Oh, hey.” That had been it. Like they’d never even fucked. Like they hardly knew each other and weren’t friend.

Jason pumps slugs into a pillow at close range and imagines it as Roy’s face and wonders where his kid crush went fucking wrong. It’s typical of his life but he hates it. How he’s always been the least important person to the people most important to him. 

Batman is like a taste in the wind. Jason tells himself “God’s not here. God is dead.” But God still made him in His image. He can feel Batman. It’s a Gnosis. Wherever he goes in the city, he always knows three points. The fixed point of Crime Alley, and the moving points, Bruce and Tim. 

Jason catches a whiff and he’s on the scent. Once upon a moment Roy had chased him like that but that was long over. All men are satisfied the moment they have their conquest.

Bruce hits like bricks and Jason thinks “Yes!” because he knows he deserves it. This was all the world ever owed him. An ex-daddy to treat him like trash. He wants Bruce to break him like Bane broke the Bat. He wants to stop moving and never get up again. Part of him fears that’s impossible.

He goes to the dark and he chants Bruce’s name until it writhes and moves and then it _is_ Batman. 

When Batman fucks him it’s like being rawed by lightning. That’s how intense the shame is. He keeps going back for more. If Roy doesn’t want him there’s no reason not to. Talia knows it. She gives him tips for deets, loves to get off while Jason shows her exactly how Bruce does him. It’s an opera at this point. Pornographic and played out. Overdramatic. 

Jason still looks for that cock like Roy looks for a used needle while he’s jonesing. He fucks Bruce and he thinks of Roy. Bruce knows it too but they don’t say anything about it. They just do their business and limp off into the dark, hoping none of the cape watchers caught that on film. Then Bruce goes home, uploads the footage from his cowl to the computer and slips it into his spank bank. 

Meanwhile, Jason drinks to forget. Forget Bruce. Forget Gotham. Forget Robin. But mostly Forget Roy. He’s pretty sure he can’t though. He’s gonna be fucked up on some oneitis crap for the rest of his life over Roy. Roy the horrible and fucked up metric by which he measures all other potential partners.

Is he kind? Check

Sense of humor? Check

Strong morals? Check

Family man? Check

Heroin addiction? Nope, doesn’t have one. NEXT!

Jason is a travesty and he knows it. Gotham knows it. The world knows it. God, if only he could lie down at the foot of it all and just stop. Simply cease to be. Not know anything any longer, leave behind no corpse to be mourned.

He wonders; would Roy miss him? He’s pretty sure he knows the answer but it’s not the one he wants to hear.

Roy is like Bruce. Still fucking Dick in his mind. They all are. If they’re not a client imagining Bruce, they’re imagining Dick. Jason is the perfect proxy to project a fantasy onto. Always the understudy, never the lead actor. He sits there, waiting, hoping Hamlet gets sick so he can run a few lines in front of an audience that misses the lead anyway because that’s who they came to see. They paid for these tickets dammit.

Roy shows up on his roof during a stake out and offers him a coffee. It’s been months since they’ve seen each other and Jason wants to ignore him because he’s above it. He doesn’t need Roy of all fucking people. But he takes the coffee anyway and he says nothing. Not even “Fuck off.” He should have every right to say “Fuck off” but he doesn’t. His mouth stays closed until he sips the coffee- exactly how he likes it, Roy remembered- and then he closes it again.

Roy says “long time no see,” and Jason grunts.

It’s a wet night. Moist like so many have been lately. The dew in the air clings to their lips as they sit there in silence. It’s awkward until Roy reaches over, lowers the binoculars from Jason’s eyes and kisses him. They fuck right there on the rooftop and Jason lets Roy push him into it. He lets it happen. The loose gravel on the roof rakes through the skin of Jason’s back until he has road rash. Roy is a weight that holds him down, bears him into the pain beneath him while they both sweat uselessly through their suits. Then they finish and Roy zips himself back into his suit before offering a quick goodnight and hightailing it. 

Jason wishes he could say Bruce makes him feel more used. But it’s Roy that reminds him he’s a cheap date. Only worth a coffee and a goodnight.


End file.
